The real time economy requires dynamic adaptive models for its realization. The core objective of the real time economy is the reduction of latency between and within processes. Latency reduction will reduce capital occupancy costs by occupying assets (physical and labor) for less time. Technology now provides a public and common communication infrastructure, increasing information sensing for automatic measurement, and large integrative databases. The second major wave of Internet usage is beginning to take shape and now that there is inter-linkage of systems on a global and ubiquitous basis, the age of the interoperable applications is emerging. Interoperability means that applications that interact do not need to be closely coupled but share common data specifications which allows for independent applications to work together without major adaptations.
The W3C has proposed the XML (extensible markup language) as the tool for data standardization for interoperability.
Figure 4: Basic XML transaction
These information capsules, as described in Figure 4, will be routed through the value chain. For data transfer to be effective it is essential that data be self explanatory and that the applications managing the data use and transfer be able to ubiquitously understand the content of this data. The XML derivative for managerial accounting is XBRL / GL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language / General Ledger) while closely associated to it XBRL is focused on external business reporting.
